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Fifty Shades of Royalties?

My daughter Sara has (apparently) been settling into her new job and home in Los Alamos, NM. She's also gotten back into blogging, and her writing is quite good, if I may kvell.

Cat Lady and I went to play bingo last night. It was the first time I ever played. While I'm not a fan of gambling, I was still able to have fun. (I'm the type that keeps thinking, "The house always wins; how can I be the house?") The games were pretty fast-paced, which required a reasonable level of focus and speed. (We each managed 72 boards for most of the games, 18 of which were played on paper, and the rest handled automatically by computer.) Everyone was pleasant and supportive. Despite our unfamiliarity with many of the subtleties of some of the individual sub-game flavors, we still actually managed to walk out ahead.

A few minor hiccups with the transition from employment, but nothing that can't be managed. Estimated taxes are handled over the Web, thankfully, (I still remember IRS transmission slips that one had to physically walk to the bank), but the biggest challenge is in trying to nail down what my net income will actually be. My prior 401(k) provider was acquired, just as I'm trying to roll it over to a traditional IRA. Despite meeting all necessary deadlines with respect to the health insurance transition, I still ended up having to scramble for a short-term interim solution when my new provider basically said, "Yeah, we never did think we'd really be able to meet the stated deadlines so as to provide seamless coverage; oopsie, our bad!"

My primary self-employment activities continue to focus on voice acting and software design. I'd prefer to diversify income away from having one primary client for each of those lines, but it's not too terrible for the moment. I'm working on a campaign to promote my voiceover service to video creators; hope to have that ready before month's end.

Most of my voice work is performed for direct pay, but I've also been taking on a few audiobook projects in exchange for a percentage of future earnings. Three of these are complete, and a fourth won't be done for a while. I realized that there's merit in gaining more of these future royalty streams, and so I'm starting to buy some of them outright, in addition to earning them through my voice work. I bought the full rights to 14 Kindle ebook titles from one author, and I've started to purchase partial rights to a small handful of audiobook titles on Audible. Obviously, there's risk involved in never quite knowing how well individual titles are going to sell in the future, but my intent is to spread small investments over a growing portfolio of multiple titles and genres. (Protip: sex still sells, of course, so erotica is not a bad place to start. ;-) )